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I'm currently trying to rig up a Macintosh Plus I bought with a scsi2sd hard drive and internet connection. It's fun! But I've also discovered just how long a h

I'm currently trying to rig up a Macintosh Plus I bought with a scsi2sd hard drive and internet connection. It's fun! But I've also discovered just how long a history Apple has of choosing "technically better, but much less well adopted" tech in their products. For instance: - That RS-232 port in the back? Haha, nope! It's RS-422, which looks the same except it has a different pin layout. Adapters exist, of course, but 232 is much more common. - 3.5" floppies - neat, I remember this form factor from my childhood fondly. Wait.. no, these are 400k or 800k special format floppies, which aren't interchangeable :( I'm pretty close to getting a working dev environment on it though, and then the sky is the limit :)

rjsw 8y ago
What are you missing for a dev environment ? Both MPW and Think C are available to download. Slightly newer Macs are easier to use, particularly if they have ethernet, you can run Netatalk on a UNIX system to provide a file server. You can use any 3.5" floppy in an FDHD drive.
- news_to_me 8y ago
  Yeah I'll just download MPW. But I need to get the hard disk working and set up a rasberry pi as an internet modem first.
eschaton 8y ago
Rather than assuming that choices were made to confirm your biases, you might want to take a look at what the engineering realities were when the choices were made. For example, you write as though there was a standard for low-level formatting of 3.5in floppy disks when Apple made the switch from Twiggy to Sony drives for Macintosh, and as though Apple intentionally chose not to use it. Furthermore, Apple’s choice of GCR encoding probably had to do with not changing the hardware design too much as part of the switch; using MFM would’ve required a different floppy controller and therefore also different signaling, etc. Engineering trade-offs, not some sort of “Let’s be different!” aspiration. When Apple adopted high density floppies, there a standard, so Apple used it and the low-level format used (MFM) was in fact compatible across vendors. That’s why you can still read and write such disks in a USB floppy drive today.
- news_to_me 8y ago
  > Rather than assuming that choices were made to confirm your biases, you might want to take a look at what the engineering realities were when the choices were made. Whoa, calm down there partner. I wasn't trying to claim it was necessarily an intentional choice to buck the common trend at the time (although my word choice does sort of suggest that), but rather that with the benefit of retrospect, it does fit the pattern. I'm not super familiar with the tech climate at the time, but it seemed the IBM PC was pretty clearly going to be a big deal, and a lot of computer makers would clone aspects of the PC just for that fact. So, Apple at least chose not to do that. Again, not trying to make any moralistic judgements here. I just thought it was interesting.
  - skissane 8y ago
    > but it seemed the IBM PC was pretty clearly going to be a big deal, and a lot of computer makers would clone aspects of the PC just for that fact At the time, I don't think it was clear that the IBM PC was going to be a big deal. The PC was not IBM's first foray into personal computing, and its previous offerings in this area (such as the 5120 and the Datamaster) were not particularly successful. The PC was much more successful because IBM learned from its mistakes – it used mainstream/commodity parts in preference to IBM-proprietary ones, which saved it money, and then used that to enable a lower (and more competitive) price point. But, were people expecting that from IBM? Probably not, it was a deviation from IBM's previous behaviour, it was a surprise. Now, as 1982 and 1983 rolled on, it became increasingly clear that the IBM PC was a success. But by then, Macintosh development was already well advanced, and they'd already locked in to incompatible designs. Trying to go back and redesign for increased IBM PC compatibility would have just delayed them even further, and a further delayed Macintosh might not have been as successful. Plus, increased IBM PC compatibility might have meant things like 5.25 inch disks, which would have been less user-friendly. (PCs didn't get 3.5 inch disks until later.)
  - vidarh 8y ago
    At the time, at least the Amiga and Macintosh both still looked like possible viable contenders, and part of the reason for making different choices was that it was done to justify buying a different platform. If you first sacrificed PC compatibility, then you had very little reason to stick to e.g. PC format floppies etc. if you could do better (the Amiga also had it's own format - 880KB; though tools like "crossdos" let you mount and read/write PC formatted floppies). That accounts for a lot of the quirks of these platforms. Another aspect was that the market was much more fragmented. The Mac "owned" the desktop publishing segment at one time due simply to Quark Xpress. The Amiga and Atari ST owned the 16bit part of the hobbyist/game market in Europe, and the Amiga owned the video/graphics effects market for some time thanks to the VideoToaster etc.. Interoperability was not as much of a concern yet. People were used to a highly fragmented market with no clear single winner where you picked different platforms for different tools. It was first a few years into the 90's that this really changed and the PC emerged as a clear enough winner that people started investing a lot in interop.
8bitsrule 8y ago
how long a history Apple has of choosing "technically better, but much less well adopted tech" That's how I'd put it. When I found out that the replacement for their 3.5" 'Superdrive' cost $400 (while functionally-equivalent PC parts cost 1/10 of that), I started thinking of leaving Mac hardware behind. When they dropped serial ports I dropped them.
- news_to_me 8y ago
  Did you have a mac when they made those changes?
- fzzzy 8y ago
  It was not functionally equivalent. Pc floppies had a fixed motor speed but the mac floppy had a variable motor speed.
monocasa 8y ago
To be fair, RS-422 is way better for this use case. The signals are differential pairs. And at the time, serial didn't automatically imply RS-232. RS-422 was a totally valid choice, and typically the technically better option.
- ac29 8y ago
  Its my understanding that the reason for RS-422 (or 485) versus 232 is when you want long cable runs (say, over 10m). Not sure why this would matter much for computer peripherals. It would make more sense if AppleTalk used it, but it used a common ground, which eliminates the benefits of the balanced signals.
  - pstuart 8y ago
    It was a unified high speed interface that could do both. Farallon came up with cheap network adapters that allowed Macs to talk to each other (and a LaserWriter!) over local phone wiring. That was huge -- plug and play networking for mortals. Source: worked at Farallon way back when.
    - watersb 8y ago
      I was around the corner, the Mac network admin at Chiron. Hundreds of Macs, running on single-pair UTP. Good times. :-)
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Serial did imply RS-232 because it was an established industry standard, and by the 80s more than twenty years of hardware supported it. It's still in use today on technical equipment, although most of the world has moved on to its descendant - USB. It's true that RS-422 was technically better, but it was only ever used in the Apple ecosystem. Existing RS-232 hardware needed an adaptor or a complete redesign. This severely limited the appeal of the Mac in industrial automation, scientific control, and electronic development, and often made basic printing more complicated than it needed to be. Realistically, most of those were never going to be prime Mac markets. Even so, sales and market niches were lost to the PC and to competitors like HP.
baobrien 8y ago
Eh, in terms of floppies, it seems like everybody used different on disk formats back in those days. Commodore had one, IBM had one, Atari, etc... All incompatible to some degree.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

rjsw 8y ago

What are you missing for a dev environment ? Both MPW and Think C are available to download. Slightly newer Macs are easier to use, particularly if they have ethernet, you can run Netatalk on a UNIX system to provide a file server. You can use any 3.5" floppy in an FDHD drive.

news_to_me 8y ago
Yeah I'll just download MPW. But I need to get the hard disk working and set up a rasberry pi as an internet modem first.

eschaton 8y ago

Rather than assuming that choices were made to confirm your biases, you might want to take a look at what the engineering realities were when the choices were made. For example, you write as though there was a standard for low-level formatting of 3.5in floppy disks when Apple made the switch from Twiggy to Sony drives for Macintosh, and as though Apple intentionally chose not to use it. Furthermore, Apple’s choice of GCR encoding probably had to do with not changing the hardware design too much as part of the switch; using MFM would’ve required a different floppy controller and therefore also different signaling, etc. Engineering trade-offs, not some sort of “Let’s be different!” aspiration. When Apple adopted high density floppies, there a standard, so Apple used it and the low-level format used (MFM) was in fact compatible across vendors. That’s why you can still read and write such disks in a USB floppy drive today.

news_to_me 8y ago
> Rather than assuming that choices were made to confirm your biases, you might want to take a look at what the engineering realities were when the choices were made. Whoa, calm down there partner. I wasn't trying to claim it was necessarily an intentional choice to buck the common trend at the time (although my word choice does sort of suggest that), but rather that with the benefit of retrospect, it does fit the pattern. I'm not super familiar with the tech climate at the time, but it seemed the IBM PC was pretty clearly going to be a big deal, and a lot of computer makers would clone aspects of the PC just for that fact. So, Apple at least chose not to do that. Again, not trying to make any moralistic judgements here. I just thought it was interesting.
- skissane 8y ago
  > but it seemed the IBM PC was pretty clearly going to be a big deal, and a lot of computer makers would clone aspects of the PC just for that fact At the time, I don't think it was clear that the IBM PC was going to be a big deal. The PC was not IBM's first foray into personal computing, and its previous offerings in this area (such as the 5120 and the Datamaster) were not particularly successful. The PC was much more successful because IBM learned from its mistakes – it used mainstream/commodity parts in preference to IBM-proprietary ones, which saved it money, and then used that to enable a lower (and more competitive) price point. But, were people expecting that from IBM? Probably not, it was a deviation from IBM's previous behaviour, it was a surprise. Now, as 1982 and 1983 rolled on, it became increasingly clear that the IBM PC was a success. But by then, Macintosh development was already well advanced, and they'd already locked in to incompatible designs. Trying to go back and redesign for increased IBM PC compatibility would have just delayed them even further, and a further delayed Macintosh might not have been as successful. Plus, increased IBM PC compatibility might have meant things like 5.25 inch disks, which would have been less user-friendly. (PCs didn't get 3.5 inch disks until later.)
- vidarh 8y ago
  At the time, at least the Amiga and Macintosh both still looked like possible viable contenders, and part of the reason for making different choices was that it was done to justify buying a different platform. If you first sacrificed PC compatibility, then you had very little reason to stick to e.g. PC format floppies etc. if you could do better (the Amiga also had it's own format - 880KB; though tools like "crossdos" let you mount and read/write PC formatted floppies). That accounts for a lot of the quirks of these platforms. Another aspect was that the market was much more fragmented. The Mac "owned" the desktop publishing segment at one time due simply to Quark Xpress. The Amiga and Atari ST owned the 16bit part of the hobbyist/game market in Europe, and the Amiga owned the video/graphics effects market for some time thanks to the VideoToaster etc.. Interoperability was not as much of a concern yet. People were used to a highly fragmented market with no clear single winner where you picked different platforms for different tools. It was first a few years into the 90's that this really changed and the PC emerged as a clear enough winner that people started investing a lot in interop.

8bitsrule 8y ago

how long a history Apple has of choosing "technically better, but much less well adopted tech" That's how I'd put it. When I found out that the replacement for their 3.5" 'Superdrive' cost $400 (while functionally-equivalent PC parts cost 1/10 of that), I started thinking of leaving Mac hardware behind. When they dropped serial ports I dropped them.

news_to_me 8y ago
Did you have a mac when they made those changes?
fzzzy 8y ago
It was not functionally equivalent. Pc floppies had a fixed motor speed but the mac floppy had a variable motor speed.

monocasa 8y ago

To be fair, RS-422 is way better for this use case. The signals are differential pairs. And at the time, serial didn't automatically imply RS-232. RS-422 was a totally valid choice, and typically the technically better option.

ac29 8y ago
Its my understanding that the reason for RS-422 (or 485) versus 232 is when you want long cable runs (say, over 10m). Not sure why this would matter much for computer peripherals. It would make more sense if AppleTalk used it, but it used a common ground, which eliminates the benefits of the balanced signals.
- pstuart 8y ago
  It was a unified high speed interface that could do both. Farallon came up with cheap network adapters that allowed Macs to talk to each other (and a LaserWriter!) over local phone wiring. That was huge -- plug and play networking for mortals. Source: worked at Farallon way back when.
  - watersb 8y ago
    I was around the corner, the Mac network admin at Chiron. Hundreds of Macs, running on single-pair UTP. Good times. :-)
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
Serial did imply RS-232 because it was an established industry standard, and by the 80s more than twenty years of hardware supported it. It's still in use today on technical equipment, although most of the world has moved on to its descendant - USB. It's true that RS-422 was technically better, but it was only ever used in the Apple ecosystem. Existing RS-232 hardware needed an adaptor or a complete redesign. This severely limited the appeal of the Mac in industrial automation, scientific control, and electronic development, and often made basic printing more complicated than it needed to be. Realistically, most of those were never going to be prime Mac markets. Even so, sales and market niches were lost to the PC and to competitors like HP.

baobrien 8y ago

Eh, in terms of floppies, it seems like everybody used different on disk formats back in those days. Commodore had one, IBM had one, Atari, etc... All incompatible to some degree.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]